Rachel's Poetry Corner

Welcome to RPC! This is a fan blog where we post about poems that are good, poems that we like, poems that we are into!

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Now That We've Been Married All These Years (2025) by Keetje Kuipers

In Episode 412, Rachel shares her favorite satisfyingly-named poet!

Rachel: [What Keetje Kuipers thinks about love poetry] "The truest love poem has to do with forgiveness. Forgiveness of the self and forgiveness of the beloved. I think that forgiveness is the site of greatest intimacy we can have as people.

Forgiveness allows me to continue to love, and to love not only those that are still in my life, but those that are no longer in my life. It allows the endurance of love.

I don't think marriage is about making compromises with the other person, I think it's about making compromises with yourself. Marriage is about saying, I don't get to be that angry anymore, or I don't get to hold myself apart in a certain kind of pain. Now I have to share that pain."

Choosing which fragment of Rachel and Griffin's convo to include was really difficult —cause not only does she quote Kuiper a few times (and each quote is even more fascinating than the last one), but the concepts they reflect on afterwards are wonderful and insightful— so I really recommend and hope you check out this week's Poetry Corner, which you can hear and/or read here: 412: Borat Is About To Get Bing Bonged from 17:05 - 28:20

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Family Reunion (1994) by Dorianne Laux

In Episode 409, Rachel brings her first ever poet-repeat! Rachel: [Dorianne says] "Poems keep us conscious of the importance of our individual lives, personal witness to a singular life seen cleanly and with the concomitant well-chosen particulars, is one of the most powerful ways to do this. Craft is important, a skill to be learned, but it's not the beginning and end of the story."

Griffin: I like this lady a lot. I like—I like all that a lot.

Rachel: She says, "I want the muddled middle to be filled with the gristle of living."

Griffin: [yells out] That's crazy!

Dorianne's work is undeniably really special, even more so now that she's become the first poet to be invited back to the Poetry Corner! Apart from What We Carry (where you can find this poem), Rachel also mentions Laux's most recent publication: Finger Exercises for Poets, which provides different writing exercises and prompts (not to build up your finger's grip strength like Griffin suggests, although that would be awesome).

If you’d like to hear more, you can do so here: 409: The Gristle of Living from 8:30 - 19:10.

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Ketchup and Heaven (1992) by Mark Halliday

In Episode 395, Rachel shares her favorite ultra talking poet!

Rachel: He has developed a kind of poetry that is often referred to as ultra talking.

Griffin: Whoa? Fuck yeah!

Rachel: Which is something that, from what I can tell, him and some of his colleagues coined, which is this idea of kind of heightened speech, that it's like anecdotal, but there's a way to move from anecdote to meditation, to comic speculation and then to a joke. So, it's conversational, but like the tone is not necessarily conversational, if that makes sense.

Griffin: It doesn't! But I am excited to hear what one of these sounds like.

This is hands down the funniest poem Rachel's brought up to this point, and we truly love to see it. One aspect that I find really charming —and that Rachel points out— is that while you read it "you kind of follow this thought pattern that he must be having like as he is putting the poem together", and that's so much harder to pull off than what it seems! If you’d like to hear more, you can do so here: 395: Swears in Lieu of Articulation, from 5:00 - 15:00

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Dear Life (2020) by Maya Popa

In Episode 390, Rachel brings a poet who's thesis is all about wonder! 

Rachel: There was an interview in McSweeney's in 2023, and she said, "Recollecting wonder on the page presents an inherent generative challenge for poets who must, in a sense, narrate the conditions for wonder while accommodating wonder's inherent disorientation, its sense of surpassing or breaching usual language and life. A poem that too conclusively tries to explain its wonder risks forfeiting the feeling."

Griffin: [...] I also think about the fact that like if by talking about this thing, am I going to like make its… specialness like abstract in a way that it no longer is special, or like I can't communicate it effectively. Sometimes I will scrap stuff entirely because it's like, I—there's no way to make clear how much I like this like picture that my friend sent me the other—like I can't possibly do a segment on that, because I can't verbalize that or communicate that.

I'm still trying to catch my breath back because just those two first lines knocked the wind right outta me. Make sure you check out Maya Pop'a Substack, and if you’d like to hear more you can do so here:

We’ll Smell Some Ice Bags and Get Back to You from 7:00 - 16:00

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Guesthouse (2025) by Richard Siken

In Episode 385, Rachel shares her new favorite experience-documenting poet!

Rachel: [Siken] says about poetry, "You have to lock them in at the beginning, or they won't follow you And you can't let it sag or falter. You need multiple propulsions. You need the new propulsion already in place before you let go of the current one. People will go to great lengths to avoid feeling difficult things, so you have to reward them for putting up with the discomfort. People have limited attention, limited bandwidth, so you have to cut every dead word and every false gesture."

Griffin: Fuck, man.

Rachel: "It has to be relentless and inevitable. It has to be economical and precise. And above all, it has to be compressed. You have to get as much as you can into their heads before they turn away. A poem can be a hundred pages long, but it has to be a five-hundred page poem compressed into a hundred pages."

This is one of those cases were I beg you desperately to go listen to the entire segment. But, in summary, the poet suffered a stroke in 2019. And according to his neurologist, the reason for his extraordinary recovery is the fact that he is a painter and a poet! And the reason why he chooses to write the entire poem in one single paragraph is so compelling.

If you wanna know what it is, you can find out by listening here:

Who’s My Big Honey Guy, from 9:30 - 23:00

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For the Sake of Strangers (1994) Dorianne Laux

In Episode 379, Rachel shares her favourite donut-holer!

Rachel: Laux says, "As I get older, I become more and more sure that I know absolutely nothing. I thought I knew about love, about death, about motherhood, men. I know nothing. I can only guess how much less I'll know 10 years from now. But I do know my backyard, my street, the way light bounces off a car windshield in summer, how frost glazes the roses when they are fooled into buds in February. I don't know who we humans are, or why we're here, or where we're going, but I want to.

I think those eternal questions continue to be asked in spite of their mystery, because of their mystery. I explore those questions by looking deeply into the things I do know, the visible, touchable world. So often young poets try to speak to those mysteries directly, and unless they happen to be Rilke, they more often fail." [...]

"It seems to me that the world is a pathway, a conduit to the invisible, the unknowable, and helps us translate what we feel through the bodies we touch and that touch us." I feel like that was such a good reminder, because I—

Griffin: I do also love how she referred to the leaves as being glazed with dew, which made me think that she's still got a lot of that donut DNA kind of kicking around in there. 

Rachel: [chuckles] "How frost glazes the roses when they are fooled into buds in February."

Griffin: Yeah. I mean, that's great stuff, but I know where your head was at, and it was back in the donut mines.

I don't think I'm capable of adding anything new or interesting to say, so I'd like to simply shout out Griffin's short "poem" about Cherries that he lets Rachel read at the beginning of the episode. If you know, you know. If you’d like to hear more, you can do so here: Alternate Suite of Etiquette Expectations, from 7:50 - 17:10

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Fledgling (2017) by Traci Brimhall

In Episode 372, Rachel shares her favourite fledgling poet!

Rachel: She [Traci] gave an interview on 32poems.com. And she said, quote, "A great poem makes me feel less alone in the world, but it also pushes around the boxes in the attic and moves in, whether you like it or not." I also like Emily Dickinson's definition of how she defines poetry, "It makes my whole body so cold, no fire can ever warm me. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know it's poetry."

Griffin: Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ indeed! So -full disclosure here- I had to search the meaning of "fledgling" cause I sort of knew what it meant but I also kind of didn't. I know, I'm still growing. And that's what I love about this poem, what it has to say about growth, and also the enormity of even the smallest of things.

If you’d like to hear more, you can do so here: Spirit of the Fans is the Real Fifth Character, from 18:38 - 25:48

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The Thing Is (2002) & Lost Dog (2007) by Ellen Bass

In Episode 367, Rachel shares two poems that begin in a pretty dark place but don't end the way you think!

Rachel: There is an interview with her in The Adroit Journal, and they ask her about how you take specific memories and turn them into larger themes. And she says, “That's what I´m hoping will happen when I write a poem, and what I try to be alert to: that moment when the poem starts to veer towards something I didn´t anticipate, didn´t know before I started writing. Many times, the poem doesn´t open up, or I´m too dense to hear what it might be offering me, but sometimes I´m able to catch it.”

The only thing I'll add is the fact that (Rachel mentions) Ellen Bass used to live over her family's liquor store. That's a poem in itself, babey! If you’d like to hear more, you can do so here: Gun-Poppin' Think Pad Stretch, from 20:00 - 29:25

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Backwards (2014) by Warsan Shire

In Episode 348, Rachel shares an air-shifting poem!

Rachel: Warsan is a poet that was born to Somali parents in Kenya, and grew up in London. [...] I read this 2022 interview in Vogue where she said, “Long before (Beyonce's) Lemonade project, I had begun to feel really terrified about posting anything online. It had gone from my having a few hundred followers on Tumblr to suddenly having thousands. After a while I just felt like, 'Who am I? What am I doing here? Is there any intention behind what I'm posting? I'm a writer, yes, but why do I have to share my every other thought with the internet?' So I thought about the authors that I truly respected and how I discovered them. I mean, I found Toni Morrison in a library and she changed my life forever. She never had to post a selfie to remind me that she existed.” [chuckles]

This is the first poem that made me freeze completely, as if time itself had suddenly stopped. It felt like what Shire was proposing was actually about to come true. Just thinking about this poem gives me goosebumps. If you’d like to hear more, you can do so here:

Jeff the Dragon from Poetry School, from 18:50 - 33:15

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The Average Mother & There are these moments of permission (2017) by Camille Dungy

In Episode 344, Rachel shares two poems about the struggles and wonders of parenthood!

Rachel: There's this great interview she gave, and this is from 2021. By Amanda Jaros, a conversation with Camille T. Dungy. She talks about how she wrote a lot about her daughter (Callie) when she was young. And you know, and does she still do that, and is that something that's still interesting to her? And she said, quote, "I joke sometimes that four is around the age when children stop being sentient luggage."

Griffin: [chuckles]

Camille Dungy focuses mostly on writing about the environment; both her latest book, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden (2023) and the collection from which Rachel read, Trophic Cascade (2017), are testaments to that. If you’d like to hear more, you can do so here: Sentient Luggage, from 16:19 - 26:30

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Sanity (2020) and Stick Parent (2024) by Caroline Bird

In Episode 339, Rachel shares two poems surrounding motherhood and childhood!

Rachel: [...] there's a lot for me to like kind of explore in that poem. Of like —because there's also for me, when she talks about those opportunities that she had to like put her ear to something magical and nothing happened. It like speaks to this kind of like —for me, it creates kind of like an anxiousness. [...] Like things don't make sense. Like things aren't happening —like I'm not getting any feedback. And then to have this lack of mystery in some ways is like, oh— Griffin: Kind of great. Rachel: It's gotten easier, I'm not as scared.

Instead of writing some of my thoughts, I'm gonna share the quote that Rachel reads about Bird's latest book: 'So this is like hot off the presses. It is a collection about quote, "Marriage, lesbian parenthood, addiction and recovery in which a recurring dream is playing out. A world where mums impale themselves on pogo-sticks, serial killers rattle around in basements, baby monitors are haunted by someone else's baby and, through it all, love stays and stays like a stationary rollercoaster that turns out to be the scariest, most thrilling ride in the amusement park."'

If you’d like to hear more, you can do so here: A Meditative Grappling, from 7:15 - 12:56

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Domestic (1995) by Carl Phillips

In Episode 330, Rachel shares during a live show her favourite Washington University poet!

Rachel: [Carl Phillips] gave an interview in studentlife.com, and said “In the early days of writing poems, the story that was unbearable was my queerness, and my poems knew that, even if I didn't at the time. Closing each poem, I realize now that I was constructing a world within which, and a language with which, a crucial part of myself could find a voice and make space for itself.”

Just like Griffin, I was so amazed by the fact that this poem uses -and I quote- "poop as a framing device". It just speaks to the truly ridiculous and unfathomable power of poetry. If you’d like to hear more, you can do so here: More of Our Favorite St Louis Stuff, Live! , from 26:45 - 31:53

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Ode to the White-Line-Swallowing Horizon (2016) by Jamaal May

In Episode 322, Rachel brings a poet to commemorate National Poetry Month (April)! 

Rachel: Jamaal said in an interview: "I've been thinking a lot about poetry being pretty much the only art form in which the practitioners are regularly called upon to explain if and how their art will solve society's ills. I've never seen an interview with Jack White that asks him how his guitar solo will cure cancer and stave off the zombie apocalypse. I once worried about the fairness of this paradigm, but I'm starting to see it as a show of respect that people keep wondering how poetry will change the world seems to start with the implicit assumption that it could.

Art via poetry, music, sculpture, puppetry, the whole of it inspires change on a personal level rather than a global one. This is important because the individual is the whole; the creation of art argues that people are connected, ideas are connected, the past and future are connected by this moment."

Griffin: Fuck yeah!  That's so good. I think I like that -the poem was great- I think I like that shit better than the poem even.

If you’d like to hear more about May's introduction and relationship with poetry, you can do so here: Unbuttoned to the Max, from 5:33 - 13:50

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The Two-Headed Calf (1977) and The Bath (1984) by Laura Gilpin

In Episode 318, Rachel brings shares two poems by a caregiving poet!

Rachel: The Chicago Review described her as a confessional poet, but said, “without the frantic stripping of the soul that often constitutes confessional poetry.”

Griffin: That’s—Oh, that’s a fun distinction.

Rachel: They went on to say that though her poetry is plain and self-conscious and elegant, the endings leave the reader feeling “that there is more to be said, some conclusion to be drawn, some emotion to be underlined.” Which I think is a very like apt description of her poetry.

Shout out to the titles of Laura Gilpin's poetry books; The Hocus Pocus of the Universe, and The Weight of A Soul (printed posthumously). If you’d like to hear more about this wonderful poet, you can do so here: You Could Do a Choo-Choo, from 8:33 - 21:14

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Honorable mention! Huracán Sterrato: Beyond the Concrete (2022)

In Episode 255, Griffin shocked and delighted everyone with his unique poetry rec, which is —you guessed it— a Lamborghini commercial.

Griffin: The agency that wrote the ad is called DDB Group Italy is all about creating, quote, "unexpected works." This is from their mission statement. "It means that the best idea is the one you never see coming. The thing that catches you so off guard you can look away. Creativity is having the fresh perspective and raw energy to bring something into the world that no one's ever seen before. We're talking about the courage to shake things up and maybe even change them."

Rachel: [giggling] "The courage."

Griffin: I mean, in that sense, mission fucking accomplished, guys. Like, you crushed it on this one. [...] I'm imagining Don Draper standing in front of a small television and showing a room full of execs every other car commercial and being like, "What's wrong with all of these? That's right. Their coherence."

Rachel: [laughs]

Griffin: And then they make this incredible poem. Well, thank you for coming to my poetry corner. I know it's dusty and dirty. There's empty Fritos bags all over the place. 

Rachel: We'll see you again in three years.

What kind of blog would this be if it didn't include this unforgettable recommendation? A bad one. If you'd like to hear Griffin's entire segment on this dirty, dusty and wild piece of art, you can do so here: DAMN! I Feel Like a Frasier, from 8:20 - 19:30.

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All-American (2016) by David Hernandez

In Episode 315, Rachel brings an all-american poem!

Rachel: David Hernandez said, “My poems are partially autobiographical. To put a percentage on it, 57.4%.”

Griffin: [laughs]

Rachel: “Honestly, it depends from poem to poem. Some are more informed by events in my life, while others are less so. Here’s the thing. When I’m writing a poem, that’s based on an experience from memory, I don’t feel beholden to the facts. That’s the job of journalists. I’m more concerned about conveying an emotional truth, with making art through language. If the poem’s telling me ‘Look, I know you had bananas this morning in your cereal, but blueberries is sonically more interesting’, I’m going with blueberries.” [giggles]

If you’d like to hear more, you can do so here: Popcorn Plausible Deniability, from 20:24 - 29:04

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Survivor Guilt (2014) by Ron Padgett

In Episode 310, Rachel shares a poem guilty of being simply too good!

Rachel: The poet James Tate wrote: “Ron Padgett's poems sing with absolutely true pitch, and they are human-friendly. Their search for truths both small and large can be cause for laughter or at least a thoughtful sigh.” Which is exactly the kind of poet that I'm looking typically to bring to Wonderful. You know. Uh, a poet from a human.

Griffin: You did bring that dog poet one time—

Rachel: [laughs]

Griffin: —which I thought was... interesting?

Rachel: Bark... bark, bark, bark. Bark.

Griffin: I carry it in my bark.

I was gonna add a personal comment as usual, until I found this quote by Ron Padgett, that seems to have been made almost specifically for Rachel and Griffin: “Survivor Guilt is not about feeling bad about watching Survivor (the T.V. show). It’s about fickleness (a word we don’t hear much anymore). Plus ça change…”

If you'd like to hear about Ron directly soliciting poems from well-known authors to publish in his literary magazine and succeeding to do so all while still being in highschool, you can do so here: Body Burn, from 5:23 - 12:43